Quote:
Originally Posted by lrt's friend
Are there decent warning signs for the speed cameras? If not, it is a tax grab. The point of these cameras is to get people to slow down, and the most effective way is to provide a warning. It is very clumsy policy to get people to slow down by a punitive fine alone.
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It's actually fairly simple policy - it sets up a direct consistent relationship between speeding and getting fined. Other policies like requiring a live enforcer to catch a speeder complicates the situation, by adding irregularity and inconsistency, chance, discretion, judgment, possibility of bias, etc.
The evidence of effectiveness is
well established - here's the bottom line from a US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention review, for example:
Quote:
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A 2010 update to a 2006 Cochrane systematic review on the effectiveness of speed cameras included an additional nine high-quality studies and maintained the qualitative results from the previous review (C. Wilson, Willis, Hendrikz, Le Brocque, and Bellamy, 2010). The studies reported reductions in average speed of between 1 percent and 15 percent and reductions in the proportion of speeding vehicles of between 14 percent and 65 percent, relative to similar controls. Speed cameras also reduced total crashes 8 percent to 49 percent and fatal and serious-injury crashes 11 percent to 44 percent, in studies that compared pre- and postcrash data collected near camera sites.
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In Ontario, the use of speed cameras requires not only warning signs around the cameras, but signs warning they are
"coming soon" for at least 90 days before they are implemented. So there really is no excuse about not knowing that one would get fined there if speeding. (Of course, getting a fine for speeding anywhere should never be a surprise, really.)
Quote:
Originally Posted by phil235
Don’t we want people to slow down everywhere, not just where the cameras are?
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We want people to follow the speed limit* everywhere of course. In Ottawa the cameras are specifically "
in certain community safety zones near schools where speeding is a risk to our most vulnerable road users, our children". i.e., where it's believed that additional, reliable, consistent enforcement is needed to achieve that.
* My beef with equating the speed limit with "safety" is that roads are often designed to safely handle driving at speeds much higher than the posted speed limit. On the one hand this makes sense because, well, we know people speed, so there should be a "buffer" between the posted limit and actual unsafe speeds.
On the other hand, if the road is designed to be safe at higher speeds - e.g. it's too wide, too regular, too monotonous etc. and induces speeding, rather than being narrow, irregular and varied to induce slowing down - then it's actually encouraging violation of the speed limit. Which is a form of entrapment, I think.
Ultimately, bottom line, speed limits are clearly posted, easy enough to just follow them. But there should be more attention to using design to achieve safety than just regulation and enforcement.
The City knows all this, of course; hopefully that fine revenue will go towards making these sorts of actual fixes.
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